Deep Thoughts by Robert Felty

Tom Kha-Yum soup

Last night I tried out another new recipe. We bought some lemongrass awhile ago, and I have been meaning to try to make Tom Yum. I searched around the internet and found a variety of different vegetarian versions. Many of them included coconut milk, which is usually only found in Tom Kha. From what I read, it seemed like Tom Yum without fish sauce would not be very tasty. So I ultimately decided to do a bit of a mixture of the two. I boiled some lemongrass and ginger in 8 cups of water for about 30 minutes, along with some vegetable bouillon cubes and a couple teaspoons of some vegetarian tom yum paste I bought at the Asian store, which had some spices like galangal and chili. I fried up some tofu cubes (I like them better fried), and cut up some red pepper, carrots, green onions, and thai basil, which I cooked for about 10 minutes in the soup. At the end I added a can of coconut milk, a can of straw mushrooms and the juice from one lime.

Straw mushroom. Left – unpeeled. Right – peeled

One weird thing was that the straw mushrooms I bought were “unpeeled”. At first they looked different than what I was expecting. It turns out that the mushroom cap is kind of hidden under another layer, as you can see from the picture here.

French lentil soup and beer-braised red cabbage

Now that our kitchen is mostly assembled again, I decided to make some more new recipes tonight. I ended up deciding on two recipes from The Voluptuous Vegan. I chose recipes that only required what we had on hand, since it was cold and snowy, and I didn’t feel like going to the store. I did make a couple substitutions. The french lentil soup called for swiss chard, but I used bok choy, since we had a little bit that needed to be used. I then served the soup with some baguette that was a couple days old. Great for dipping. The red cabbage called for apple juice. Instead I used a bit of apple cider vinegar and some sliced fresh apples which were not looking too great anymore. Clare and I were very happy with the results. These recipes might be making second appearances!

French lentil soup

Beer-braised red cabbage

A few weeks ago I noticed a very strange bug with all of my wordpress plugins in the newest version of wordpress (2.7). All of the plugins can be used as widgets. When I tried to add one of plugin widgets to the sidebar, it seemed to be okay, but when I clicked on “save changes”, it would disappear. I then later discovered that it was sort of added. If I checked “show unused widgets”, then I would see my widget in the list, and if I tried to add it from here, the changes would stick.

A couple weeks ago I spent several hours trying to figure out what had changed in the widget handling code from wp 2.6 to 2.7, and decided to start from a wordpress default widget – the text widget, and see if I could get it to work, and then gradually change it to my plugin. I made some pretty good progress, but at the end I could not figure it out. I knew that I needed several hours of solid work to unravel the mystery, and with the holidays and moving across the country, I didn’t find the time until today.

But today I finally figured it out, and it actually only took me about an hour. It turns out I needed to change 3 bytes (characters). I happen to like mixed case, so many of my variables and such in my code look like “collapsArch”, or “collapsLink”. It turns out that the widget id in wp 2.7 will not allow mixed case. Or rather, it will exhibit the strange behavior I have been seeing. So changing “collapsArch” to “collapsarch” in 3 places in the widget handling code fixed the problem.

I have released updates to all 4 plugins today, along with a new debugging option, which should make it easier to solve possible problems. When the debug option is selected, some debugging information gets written to the page in a hidden <pre> environment. This way you can see what is going on by viewing the source, but most visitors will not notice the fact that you are debugging.

stove-top stuffing

We recently found ourselves with a lot of stale bread. What does one do with stale bread? Make stuffing! We weren’t about to actually stuff anything (besides our bellies), so I just made it on the stove in a pan. Clare came up with the idea to make it, and with the brilliant idea of adding some vegetarian sausage crumbles. We were very happy to discover that the grocery store right by our new house in Colorado carries Morningstar sausage crumbles. We discovered them several years ago in Michigan, but they have been very difficult to find lately, especially while we were living in Indiana.

cooking the stuffing

The stuffing was pretty simple to make. I cut up all our stale bread, which included some white bread, some pumpernickel, and some homemade bread from my aunt. Then I let it sit out in a large bowl for a day to dry out. Last night I sautéed a large onion and about 10 celery stalks, added a bunch of italian seasonings, some white pepper, and some fennel seed, then finally added about 2 cups of vegetable stock and the sausage crumbles. Once the mixture was boiling, I turned off the stove, then stirred in the bread, and put the top on the pan and let it sit for about five minutes.

stuffing close-up

It turned out to be very flavorful, and fit all the current requirements for our taste buds – not garlicky or spicy for Clare, and flavorful (for both of us). It also marks my 3rd new recipe of the year. I don’t anticipate making it too often, since I don’t often find myself with that much stale bread, but it is good should that happen.

vegetarian pho

Today I made the second new recipe of the year. Clare has been very excited about pho lately, but most pho restaurants don’t seem to offer a vegetarian option, so we thought we would give it a try. We mostly followed the recipe from the
ellie may website, which was the first google hit for “vegetarian pho”. Clare actually did much of the work on this one. We found an Asian grocery store today, which among other things had a pho spice mix, which came in a teabag. That made some very tasty broth. We also got fresh rice noodles, and I must say that I did a nice job of frying up the tofu.

vegetarian pho up close

I made a goal to make 52 new recipes in 2009, averaging one per week. I am tracking my progress on kibotzer.com which is a new website designed to help people track goals. The main idea is to “stay on the yellow brick road”, which you can see in the graph there that it generates for me.

vegetarian pho for two, with garnishes and condiments